Paula Long founded EqualLogic, which was acquired by Dell in 2007. She was only interested to get back in business with a truly game changing idea, which she did: Data-aware storage.

DataGravity won the ‘best of show’ award at VMworld 2014 in the category new technology, definitely a good start. I had the pleasure to speak with Paula Long last week and learn about DataGravity’s plans and current status.[Read more…]

For my CEO Series I interview CEOs and founders of start-ups in IT Infrastructure, SAAS, Fintech, Mobile and eCommerce. Their views are shared on my blog.

Recently I had the great honor to speak with John W. Thompson. It is hard to introduce such a heavyweight, so I will start by listing a few of the most notable positions he occupies. His positions, besides being impressive – are relevant to understand the viewpoints he holds and voiced during the interview.

After a long career at IBM where he held various executive positions, John W. Thompson became CEO at Symantec, which he helped build to a $6 billion company over a period of 10 years. In 2009, he was contender to be secretary of the Department of Commerce.

In 2009 he became involved with Virtual Instruments (VI) as an investor and became CEO of VI in 2010. Besides this demanding role, in February of this year John W. Thompson was famously appointed Chairman of the Board at Microsoft, replacing Bill Gates. In this function he was involved in replacing former CEO Steve Ballmer with the current CEO Satya Nadella. Here is a link to his appointment speech.

Additionally, PernixData, Liquid Robotics, Domo and Seagate are among the companies where John holds advisory positions. [Read more…]

As a part of my CEO series, I interview CEOs of innovative companies in the fields of Storage, Virtualization and Networking.

Nimble Storage was founded in 2008, offering a hybrid storage model that works both with magnetic disk and flash storage. They have been very successful and went IPO very succesfully on December 13 of last year.

I had the pleasure to interview Suresh Vasudevan and learn about his background and gain insights into Nimble’s company culture and post IPO plans.

You are a born Indian and studied there, how did you transition into Silicon Valley and the Storage field?Yes I was born and brought up in India and studied there, then I joined McKinsey consultancy in India. The work was a lot of fun, most of what I did was strategy consultancy which I loved. I then moved for McKinsey to Chicago and the assignments there were considerably less interesting.

(laughing) I was into operations and restructuring of steel plants and paper companies – and so on, which was a lot less exciting then what went on in Silicon Valley at the time.[Read more…]

Employees are expecting ever increasing flexibility with regards to how they work, both in terms of mobility and range of devices. This poses an interesting security challenge for the Corporate IT department. Giving devices open access to uncontrolled networks makes them highly vulnerable.

Arguably the largest risk for endpoint devices like phones, laptops and tablets to get infected is website access through your browser. Malicious code can run on your endpoint through your browser, affecting your entire device, the files on it and potentially the network that the device is brought into.

Enter Hillview Technologies. They have developed a service that protects all endpoint devices from getting infected by malignant code running on websites.

Hillview effectively creates a proxy-based security buffer between the browser on your endpoint and the actual website you visit, so that no code – malignant or benign – ever runs on your device.

For a bit of background, Hillview Technologies is a VMware security spinout. I spoke with the VP of Engineering Marios Leventopoulos who ran me through their product and company history.[Read more…]

Diablo Technologies VMware ready

Diablo is doing great. They partnered up with Smart Storage Systems, which was then acquired by Sandisk that sells Diablo Memory channel Storage (MCS) as Sandisk UltraDIMM and TeraDIMM. IBM is now using UltraDIMM in their x-series servers where it is called eXFlash

The news today; Diablo Technologies VMware ready status is announced today. VMware’s ‘check’ will certainly help market adoption and is another sign this innovative technology is here to stay. I congratulate Diablo with this achievement!